MEASURING CULTURAL VALUE
(PHASE 2)
Dr Claire Donovan, Brunel University
PRICELESS? A HOLISTIC APPROACH
TO ‘MEASURING’ CULTURAL VALUE
Dr Claire Donovan, Brunel University
The context
AHRC/ESRC Public Service Placement Fellowship in
partnership with Department of Culture, Media and
Sport
competitive research grant
based at DCMS
part of wider DCMS initiative
Phase
One (O’Brien, 2010) concluded that the cultural
sector must use the concepts and tools of economics to
make the case for public funding
The very idea of measuring cultural value
highly contested territory
cultural value is either ...
measureable
by assigning
monetary value, e.g.
willingness
to pay
choice analysis
hedonic pricing
or
‘intangible’ so cannot be
measured at all
two cultures of valuation:
cynics
sentimentalists
Two cultures of valuation
“What cynics you fellows are!”
“What is a cynic?”
“A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
“And a sentimentalist, my dear Darlington, is a man who sees an
absurd value in everything, and doesn’t know the market price of a
single thing.”
- Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan, Act 3.
The approach
A ‘cynical-sentimental’ approach
mirrors debates in assessing research impact, especially in
humanities, creative arts and social sciences (Donovan 2008;
2011)
resistance to economic reductionism
‘state of the art’ includes, and extends beyond, economic
measures
Empirical testing of measures
do these potentially add value to making policy decisions about
funding the cultural sector?
include measures of supposedly ‘intangible’ benefits alongside
indicators drawn from cultural economics
The approach
Cross-sector credibility
Stakeholder involvement
workshops
the
‘Priceless?’ blog; Twitter
Stakeholder consensus
A ‘cynical-sentimental’ solution
Welcome to the measuring
cultural value debate which
began in 2003 …. I
wonder if you are trying to
reinvent the wheel?
Does the use of social media authentically represent
public engagement in the cultural value debate?
Phase Two conclusions
A holistic approach to ‘measurement’
quantitative
(monetary)
quantitative (non-monetary)
qualitative indicators
narrative approaches
Proportionality
‘measures’
to fit scale of enterprise and desired outcomes
Abandon ‘toolkit’
sector
what
guidance more valuable
‘measures’ to use and when
Next steps
Final report (Summer 2012)
Dissemination
final report online (and hard copy?)
the ‘Priceless?’ blog
academic conferences and seminars
academic journal papers (with Dave O’Brien)
SRAC
Practitioner-oriented conferences and seminars
Can these novel approaches apply to ‘measuring’ other
areas of public investment?
Any questions?
claire.donovan@brunel.ac.uk
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